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Captain Scott’s Desert Island Discs. A flavour of what were the happening sounds in Antarctica 100 years ago

This article was written by Jasper Rees and published on theartsdesk 11 April 2012

The gramophone on which Scott and his men listened to music hall and opera at the bottom of the world

Centenaries are sizeable business in 2012. It just so happens that the Olympics are coming to the United Kingdom for the third time in a year which finds us thinking very hard about if being British still means the same thing as it did 100 years when two momentous calamities singed themselves into the national psyche: the Titanic sank, and Captain Scott and his four companions never made it back from the South Pole.

Adam Sweeting has already reported on the deluge of Titanica fanning across the television schedules from National Geographic docs to Drownton. The Scott industry is spreading itself more widely across the year. As well as three exhibitions – at the Natural History Museum, the Queen’s Gallery and the National Museum of Wales – you can also enjoy a musical flavour of what it was like to be a the bottom of the world with the Terra Nova expedition by investing in a new double-disc CD. On it is a selection of scratchy recordings Scott and co took south with them to remind them of home in the long polar night. In fact they had a library of hundreds of tunes to listen to, and the choice can do no more than suggest the range of musical tastes catered for, from Enrico Caruso to Nellie Melba, from Harry Lauder to Weber’s Concertino for horn. Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” was on hand to gird the loins as the men prepared to strap themselves into man-hauling harnesses. For many of the jauntier tunes some of the chaps will dressed up in drag and danced along.

The records were donated to the expedition by The Gramophone Company (nowadays known as EMI), along with two splendid old gramophones, one of which is on display at the Natural History Museum’s current exhibition. The main track listing concludes with “God Save the King”. Two additional tracks include Ernest Shackleton taking about his own unsuccessful attempt on the Pole three years earlier. There is a piquant irony to its inclusion. Scott and Shackleton had history, and were not friends, although that did not stop Scott using Shackleton’s expedition journal as a useful pathfinder. The full track listing of Scott’s Music Box is as follows.

2 thoughts on “Captain Scott’s Desert Island Discs. A flavour of what were the happening sounds in Antarctica 100 years ago”

This is a great story — thanks so much for publishing it, otherwise I wouldn’t have seen it! Timely, as my students were asking me earlier this term when we covered mechanical music what records Scott had with him; I’d been curious, too!

George Martin on Abbey Road Studios

"...one can sense the presence of the great engineers and producers of the past, long since gone. Names which may mean little to the average man, but great people such as Arthur Clarke, Dougie Larter, Bob Beckett, Charlie Anderson, Walter Legge, Charlie Thomas and my dear own mentor, Oscar Preuss, who taught me so much. These men flew the record industry in open cockpits by the seat of their pants, and paved the way for the modern, jetstream, computerised machine that today's young talents have to guide."